Interesting article in thsi weeks Economist on defending Taiwan
The main take-away is :-"Defending Taiwan is growing ever harder. A decade ago China had four times as many warships as Taiwan. Today it has six times as many. It has six times the number of warplanes and eight times as many tanks. China’s defence budget, merely double Taiwan’s at the end of the 1990s, is now 25 times greater .
American intelligence officials do not think that China is about to unleash this firepower. The PLA’s amphibious fleet has grown slowly in recent years. China has never held even a single exercise on the scale that would be required for a D-Day-type campaign. Indeed, no country has assaulted a well-defended shore since America did so in Korea—with good reason."
They quote studies showing he island is very defensible given the will to do it.
However they reckon the Taiwanese military are tank & plane heavy (most war games show neither would last long in a real invasion) and short on anti-ship missiles that would make mincemeat out of a landing force. Worse they have a poor record of training, that only half of Taiwanese seem willing to fight inf there is an invasion and that only 20% think there will be a war. them of course is the question of what casualties the US and others are willing to take